Edgar Wright Explains Why The Running Man Keeps Its Year a Mystery

Edgar Wright finally unleashed his take on Stephen King’s The Running Man, with Glen Powell front and center. It’s based on King’s 1982 novel published under the Richard Bachman alias, and here’s the first thing people keep asking: why doesn’t the movie say what year it takes place in? There’s a reason, and it’s smarter than it sounds.

Why Wright kept the year a mystery

King originally set the book in 2025. Back then, that felt impossibly far off. Now it’s... today. Wright told Sight and Sound’s James Mottram that putting a date on a dystopia can age your movie in all the wrong ways.

"In the movie, we don’t say what year it is. And the reason we don’t is because I’m always very conscious that in films with dystopian future worlds, they never can go far enough. I wish we were living in 2001 as Stanley Kubrick saw it in 1968. We’re not even there now. Or Escape from New York, which I love, is a 1981 film, set in the year 1997. We’re way past that too. So you have to throw it further, or just don’t date it at all."

And King’s logic at the time was beautifully simple:

"I just thought to myself, when I wrote the book 2025 just seemed so far in the future that I couldn’t even grasp it in my mind."

Short version: Wright would rather let the world feel uncomfortably close than stamp a date that will turn into an accidental punchline a few years later.

We’ve already lived through a lot of yesterdays’ futures

Wright name-checks 2001 and Escape from New York, but the pile of past-due futures is huge. A few greatest hits:

• Death Race 2000 (1975): imagined the year 2000 as a U.S. where the government keeps everyone docile with a national road race that literally rewards running over pedestrians.
• Rollerball (1975): set in 2018, with corporations replacing nations and ruling through a hyper-violent sport; James Caan’s star player starts questioning the whole rigged system.
• Akira (1988): Neo-Tokyo, 2019, rebuilt after a cataclysmic 1988 event; biker gangs, weaponized psychics, and a city gearing up for the 2020 Olympics — a detail that landed strangely close to reality.
• Blade Runner (1982): November 2019, Los Angeles as a neon-drenched downpour where bioengineered replicants are hunted by cops with moral headaches.

That retro-future vibe never really left. Fallout and Blade Runner 2049 keep nudging us toward the idea that the future is messy, not shiny.

About that 1987 Running Man movie

This isn’t the first time the story has hit the screen. The 1987 version, directed by Paul Michael Glaser, took the premise and ran it through an 80s action filter. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Ben Richards, with Maria Conchita Alonso as Amber Mendez, Richard Dawson as the game-show puppet master Damon Killian, Yaphet Kotto as William Laughlin, and Jesse Ventura as Captain Freedom.

It was set in a dystopian United States across 2017–2019 and followed a convicted man forced onto a deadly game show to win his freedom. The movie came out November 13, 1987, got mixed reviews, and over time picked up cult status — partly because it tapped into anxieties about economic collapse and an obsession with reality TV long before reality TV swallowed everything.

Fans of the book will know that film was a very loose adaptation. Wright’s version is pitched as the faithful one, keeping the bones King built and dialing back the quippy spectacle.

Stephen King’s 2025 takeover

Wright’s The Running Man landed in November 2025 with Powell headlining, but it’s just one piece of a big King year. The Monkey dropped earlier in 2025, leaning into horror with a mean streak of dark humor. Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck arrived mid-year, telling a man’s life in reverse. Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk is set for September 2025 and goes full dystopia with a brutal, rules-are-the-punishment premise. There are more on the runway too — including Flanagan’s Carrie, already in post-production.

If it feels like dystopia is having a moment again, you’re not imagining it. We’re back in that 2010s lane where bleak futures are the main attraction.

So, how’s Wright’s version?

The Running Man is in U.S. theaters now. If you’ve seen it, I’m curious where you land: closer to the sharper, book-faithful survival nightmare Wright’s selling, or nostalgic for Schwarzenegger’s TV-gladiator chaos?